The author describes a method of teaching number conservation, focusing on its successful use a 16- year- old severely educationally subnormal boy. (LS)

Children in grades 1, 3, and 5 and college students were given a variety of judgment tasks contrasting the comparison of quantity with the comparison of proportions to determine whether the understanding of proportions develops before formal operations. Results indicated that the comprehension of abstract relations requires formal operations.…

The development of children's understanding of the permanence of various social roles was examined in 16 four- and 16 five-year-old children. A social role conservation battery consisting of 12 items on the permanence of self-identity, gender, child and sibling roles was given under three temporal conditions: the past (i.e., when you were a baby,…

This paper briefly reports on a series of studies that explore the relationship between symbolic or pretend modes of reasoning and cognitive processes which underlie conservation of quantity. It is hypothesized that the mental transformations which the child makes while playing a game of make-believe, namely, the transformation from his original…

This study investigates relationships among conservation, field dependence/independence, school variables, achievement, screening measures, sex and race. A total of 124 first, second and third graders in a Southern rural school were administered 8 typical Piagetian conservation tasks (PCT), Children's Embedded Figures Test (CEFT), Comprehensive…

A Piagetian framework is provided for understanding patterns of cognitive growth and their relation to early reading achievement among kindergarten children. Reference is made to relevant research, including recent Piagetian interpretations of prereading, language, and logical thinking. Instructional strategies are offered to guide kindergarten…

This paper reviews literature related to two questions: (1) How do preschoolers acquire numerical concepts? (2) What range of basic numerical knowledge do beginning kindergarteners possess? The first section briefly highlights main ideas of learning theories. The second section discusses Piaget's concept of conservation of number and how young…

This study investigated the relationship between both age and conservation and education and conservation. The participants were 16 middle-aged adults, 16 institutionalized adults, and 16 noninstitutionalized adults. Each individual was given three conservation of substance problems, three conservation of weight problems, and three conservation of…

Two experiments involving 40 developmentally disabled children (7 to 13 years old) and 32 normal school children (from grades 2-5) were designed to produce a cognitive assessment tool, based on musical conservation tasks, which would be particularly useful with visually handicapped children. Implications from the research were that these tasks…

These forty conference papers deal with a wide variety of new approaches to the application of developmental theory. The papers represent a cross-section of current research methodology and techniques used to evaluate such traditional Piagetian topics as concrete and formal operations, conservation, classification skills, language development,…

The efficacy of small group instructional programs in classificatory, seriation, and combined class/series skills was evaluated for a sample of 60 urban, middle-class, 4- to 5-year-old children in a transfer of training design. Significant curriculum-specific transfer effects were found for the seriation instructional condition, whereas little…

A study was undertaken of the effects of formal education and conservation of numerousness on addition and subtraction problem types. Thirty-six kindergarten and 36 first-grade subjects randomly selected from one area of a school district were administered measures of conservation, problem-solving success, and modeling ability. Following factor…

In this paper the author reviews and synthesizes the research literature concerning the developmental relationships between conservation of number and linguistic capability in handling of quantitative and relational terms. Several models for the development of these competencies are discussed. On the basis of this review the author concludes that…

The purpose of this study was to test training techniques designed (1) to induce conservation of discontinuous quantity in children, and (2) to induce ability to take different social roles. Also tested was this hypothesis: successfully training children in conservation will improve their ability to take different social roles, and conversely,…